


Sharp as a Blade (The Vultures Take Wing)

by shooting-stetsons (TheUniverseWillSing)



Series: Lion-Hearted Girl [4]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Soldiers, F/M, Gen, Stillbirth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 15:50:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheUniverseWillSing/pseuds/shooting-stetsons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is born in the rain and fire.</p><p>A standalone piece about Natalia Romanova.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sharp as a Blade (The Vultures Take Wing)

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly this is just because I found out how to format crazy letters tbh.

She is born in the rain and fire, her first cries sharp as a knife in the cutting silence. The world burns around them but nothing can hurt them as long as they are together. Mother, father, brother, and now a sister called Natalia, a family founded in secrets and lies to shield themselves from the new government. Even though her mother has changed her name still the nation hunts a missing princess.

The world burns around them but nothing can hurt them as long as they are together. When the bombs impede on their world, when her brother chokes to death on ashes, when the heat is so strong her father is permanently scarred, her mother throws her out a window to a passing officer and Ｓｈｅ’ｓ  ａ  Ｒｏｍａｎｏｆｆ，  ｂｕｔ—！

Those are just the accounts she would later wrench out of witnesses, neighbors, friends. She is too little to remember but there’s a scar on her thigh where a broken window cut her like a knife. Some nights she presses a thumbnail into it and imagines she can still smell the smoke.

She is six years old and wild like the brambles, her hair the color of blood on snow and her laugh a sharp birdlike call when Ivan teaches her how to hunt. She doesn’t know that most little girls are afraid of blood because she’s never met another little girl before, only grins like a proud huntress when Ivan dots the blood of her first kill on her cheeks and carries her home on broad shoulders. He lets her skin and gut the rabbit herself with a knife he then promises is hers to keep.

They are isolated together, she and Ivan, in their little cabin on the edge of the frozen world. Some days it feels like the coldness is a part of her, sinking into her bones like an old friend’s embrace. But the embrace can’t last forever.

When the army takes Ivan away he sends her to a place he thinks will be safe, a boarding school far away where she would never want for anything but would learn how to work for it as well.

It is there that she learns what it really means to kill, to hurt without remorse, to be unmade. She is six years old when they strip her of her wildness, pull it out of her like gutting a rabbit on a bloody operating table, modify it into something acceptable and  fierce and sharp as a blade, and put it back into her.

After the first operation she cries. Her scars hurt and she is six years old. They hit her. Tears are for children. She stops crying.

Ivan visits when he can, when the army allows it. Every time he looks more afraid, afraid of what the Department is doing, afraid of what she’s becoming, afraid of her silence where laughter used to sit, of long straight hair that used to spring in curls, of poisonous green eyes that once were brown.

She is Natalia she is Natasha she is Nadia and Nastia and Nadine. They crack her head open, scoop it hollow, put something (someone) new inside and she can’t even fight anymore. She is too used to the pain to know anything else.

Sometimes the real Natalia slips through the cracks. She hugs Ivan goodbye and whispers _I don't know what's real anymore_ into his ear. He tries to hold her tighter but she slips away like mist, already forgetting, a new girl shifting into position. Ivan’s face falls. What a nice man.

They are taught not to love. Love impedes efficiency. And yet she is the only one with a father of sorts, someone to visit her and tell her what a wonderful woman she is growing into. She is sharp as a knife and holds him in her eyes until she sees that he is being honest. A crack forms. Some night she lies awake thinking of his kindness and the crack yawns wider. She misses him.

She is sharp as a knife and she understands emotions when they belong to other people. The head tilts to the side when someone’s curiosity is peaked.

Pupils dilate when they’re afraid/aroused/frustrated/disgusted and they sweat when they’re nervous. The eyebrows draw up in sadness, down in anger.

Then ｓｈｅ  ｍｅｅｔｓ  ａ  **_ｂｏｙ_** on a mission, and her head tilts to the side when he smiles, and her pupils dilate because she is frustrated by the reaction she didn’t initiate/afraid of what this means/disgusted by the thought of wanting him/ _wanting him._

She hasn’t wanted something since her first operation.

The moment she knows she wants him she is consumed. There is a fire in her heart that won’t be extinguished until she has him, and then she has him and the fire roars like the one that killed her mother/father/brother. This fire is what kills and yet also makes a family of their foolish games.

A plane falls from the sky and her twenty-year-old husband is dead. She is sixteen winters old when she feels a kick in her belly, kept hidden by the layers she wears in the trenches. No one knows. Even more than her need, Natalia wants. She wants the baby growing inside of her, she wants to hold on to the fire a dead man left burning in her ribs. Or maybe that’s the fever; it’s been raining for days.

They send her ahead to the next village as scout, because she knows all the dark and secret paths to make herself unseen. She knows how to unmake herself in the night time and come together again come sunrise. It should have taken a day, maybe two tops, but she finds a family living all alone in the abandoned village and her pains start halfway there.

She reminds herself that she is stronger than this, that her body is superior to all others and will obey her. Barks orders at the family to follow her if they want to live. They think she’s leading them into the woods to kill them, and she thinks she’s leading them into the woods to kill them, but she collapses in the snow instead and blood blooms between her legs.

A gust of wind howls in in all the empty spaces in her chest as they bury her beautiful, dead baby with the frozen wild roses.

Ｔｈｅ  ｃｒａｃｋｓ ａｒｅ  ｓｔｉｌl **_ｂｌｅｅｄｉｎｇ._**  
  



End file.
